Good News? Assessing Time-Trends in Fidelity to Responsible Reporting of Suicide Guidelines in the Canadian News Media from 2019-2023
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Research indicates that detailed and sensational media coverage of suicide can contribute to suicide mortality, known as the Werther Effect. Other research indicates that responsible reporting of suicide can promote hope and resilience, which can reduce suicidality, known as the Papageno effect. This has led to the development of responsible reporting of suicide guidelines. In Canada, these are contained in a booklet called Mindset, which was co-created by journalists and mental health experts. Mindset lists bullet-pointed recommendations for journalists, and has been widely disseminated to newsrooms, journalism schools and media professionals across the country, in tandem with educational activities aimed at journalists by suicide prevention experts. Objectives The overall aim of this study is to assess fidelity to Mindset responsible reporting of suicide guidelines in the Canadian media over a multi-year period. A secondary objective is to assess whether fidelity to responsible reporting of suicide guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic was significantly different to pre/post pandemic reporting of suicide. Methods We collected articles from 47 different Canadian national and regional news sources mentioning the word suicide on a daily basis from April 1 st 2019 to March 31st 2023 (N=3,232). Each article was read and assessed for adherence to 12 key suicide reporting guidelines using a purposely-built coding sheet, derived from the Mindset guidelines. Trends in reporting were analyzed through time series analyses using a GLARMA model in R. software, including measuring for change during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results Significant increases in putatively protective content were observed over the four years, including rises in the inclusion of help-seeking information and the quotation of experts. Similarly, there was a general decrease in content that is putatively harmful, for example significantly fewer articles in latter years gave a monocausal explanation of suicide, used sensational language or described in detail any suicide method. That said, fewer than one-third of articles in the final year included educational content about suicide, help-seeking information, or quotes from suicide experts. Reporting of suicide during the COVID-19 pandemic showed some positive improvements compared to pre-pandemic reporting, but these were not sustained post-pandemic. Conclusions Fidelity to responsible reporting of suicide guidelines improved over the four-year period, especially recommendations concerning putatively helpful content. However there remains room for improvement regarding inclusion of putatively protective content such as including help-seeking information and educating the public about suicide. As such, further educational outreach to journalists is needed to encourage greater inclusion of protective content, while avoiding harmful content. Disclosure of Interest None Declared
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".